On September 1st 2020, Compendia had its first coordinated network upgrade.

39 out of 47 validators updated on the scheduled time, and in 12 hours all 47 validators were updated.

This scheduled network upgrade was done to support our new wallet update: Second Signatures and Signed Messages.

New Wallet Features

Tools Panel

The new tools panel introduces various wallet features (with more features coming soon):

• Add Second Signature
• Sign Message
• Verify Message

Second Signatures

You can now add a second signature to your wallet in the Tools panel.

Once a second signature is added, transactions can only made if you have access to both your wallet private key (mnemonic, or encrypted key + password) and your second signature key.

When you log in to a second signature wallet, you'll be asked for both your wallet and second signature passwords.

What is it good for?

Simply put: your wallet is safer thanks to a second private key.

With a second signature, even if someone has access to your wallet's keys, they can't make any transactions with it if they don't have access to the second signature keys.

This is especially useful for validators, who have their wallet mnemonic stored on their forging node. The second signature key does not need to be stored on the node in order to sign blocks, so even if the forging node is compromised, the validator's funds are safe.

A second signature registration transaction has a ß 0.25 transaction fee.

Sign & Verify Messages

You can now generate and verify Compendia Signed Messages.

Similar to Bitcoin Signed Messages, you can sign a message with your wallet's private key. This results in a special message that contains the message, your wallet public key, and the message signature.

This is what a signed message looks like:

-----BEGIN COMPENDIA SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hello! This is a signed message.
-----BEGIN SIGNATURE-----
024458b81ee23cf9a7c34bae1a8efe6ba87bf2067e983169fbbac812ece4ab7938
304402204758bac8efe8a3085675ac59aa241309cbd1c73c53e07c48a2bb42ca72244a1f02201bc00397424df86a4ba98fd53ebe16e4c6c682a67235862982b2cac0cdb2f404
-----END COMPENDIA SIGNED MESSAGE-----

The first line under BEGIN SIGNATURE is a wallet's public key. The second line is the message signature.

Any message can be verified by pasting it in the Verify Message tool (found in the Tools panel).

Apps can also verify messages using the @compendia/verify-message NPM package.

What is it good for?

Apps can verify that you own a certain wallet by giving you a special code to sign.

For example, the validator directory CompendiaValidators.com (made by validator the_bobbie_bunch) uses signed messages to safely connect a wallet address to a user account.

The tools panel will have more features in the future.

We're also introducing a DeFi panel soon, with ERC20 Wrapped Bind (wBIND) and Uniswap integration!